Category Archives: Includes a Recipe

When you spend lots of time wandering about in the woods, the odd things you find yourself doing there sort of sneak up on you. Many many springs ago I had taken a chef for a hike about the woods. I’d sort of forgotten them when a voice yelled “what the hell are you chewing”. I turned and realized I had fir tip bits stuck around my lips. Uh oh, trust me, no one was doing that then. Plucking and tasting the delicate apple green little tips from one tree and then another, had always been a private pleasure. Each Douglas fir tree has a slightly different flavor. One may taste like Meyer lemon peel or tangerine peel. Another might taste like peach skin, and then another may be a sharp resiny green flavor. You can taste the wondrous genetic variation in these surprisingly delicious wild trees. The same grazing tastiness can be done with many spruces in the lands blessed with spruce trees and their brush like tips.

I feel a bit less crazy now and more than vindicated after a wave of intrepid chefs across the country and even Europe have welcomed the citrus bright and foresty flavor into a range of dishes from fois to desserts. You can also now belly up to our beautiful western tree in cocktails, beers and beautiful eau de vies.

Although Douglas fir trees are native to the west, they have been propagated widely as ornamental and as a lumber trees. They can now be found throughout the East, Midwest and are even found widely planted in Europe. Finding spruce trees is a similar situation. Both of these trees are either native or planted widely. Our beloved pagan tree worshipping tradition has made Christmas tree farms a handy source of both of these trees. If you explain to the farmer that you just want to pinch the side tips off, they may welcome you with genuine gratitude since this is a form of pruning that makes the trees nice and bushy. Never pinch or cut off the tip on the top of the tree or harvest more than maybe a fifth of each tree’s new tips. You can take far more of the mature needles if this is what you’re going to use. Just harvest a branch and strip the needles off.

The citrus flavor of many of these fir and spruce tips reflects the vitamin C rich content. The flavor remains as the tips mature into the deep green needles we know all year round. The texture changes however, from the very tender pale tips that can be tossed into a salad to the toughened deep green mature needles. If you’ve come to love tender fir tips, don’t give up. The hardened mature needles have magnificent flavor that I find even more complex than young tips. You just extract the flavor differently. Oil, vodka, and water are all fine vehicles for the transforming a mighty tree into uniquely delicious treats.

Brilliant green, fragrant fir tips

Here’re a few ideas. With all of these, begin with the tips or regular needles that you have stripped off the stems.

Douglas Fir OilIn a blender, put 2 cups of a fine neutral flavored oil like almond oil with ¾ C fir needles . Hit “liquefy”. In 1-2 minutes the oil will be a gorgeous emerald green. Put this in a jar and into the refrigerator for 24 hours. Take out and pour this mess into a sieve over bowl. Let it just sit as it warms to room temperature. After a couple hours, press the green goop in the sieve to extract all the oil possible. Put a paper coffee filter in a funnel and pour the sieved oil mixture into the paper filter. Let drain through a filter. This will go slowly and can take as much as 24 hours. The beautiful clear green oil should be kept in the refrigerator.

Use this oil for: Dotting or drizzling on cooked fish, game like venison, duck and even plain chicken.

Douglas Fir TeaThis simple popular tea requires just a tablespoon of needles in 1 ½ C boiling water. Strain into a mug after steeping for 2 minutes. Add honey if you wish. This is a nice ice tea as well.

Fir or Spruce Syrup:This syrup is a great treat for everything from waffles to cocktails.

1 C fir or spruce needles or tips
1 C sugar
2 T light corn syrup

Put the fir or spruce tips or needles into a food processor. Pulse until very finely chopped.
In a saucepan put sugar, corn syrup and 1/3 C plus 2 T water. Stir and bring to a boil. Boil for one minute then add the chopped needles. Remove for the heat. Steep for 3-4 hours. Strain through a fine sieve. Discard the green goop in strainer. Put in a jar and keep refrigerated.

Use for: Waffles, pancakes or biscuits of course. This marvelous syrup is also ideal to use as the sweetener in recipes for ice cream, sorbet, panne cotta, or as a secret ingredient for some of the great cocktails below.

Fir or Spruce VodkaWhat could be simpler? Put 1 cup fir or spruce needles into a blender with a half or 3/4 of a 750 ML bottle of vodka, as much as you can get in a blender. Hit “liquefy” and blend for 2 minutes. Pour this mixture and the balance of the vodka bottle into a large jar and put in the refrigerator for two days. Give it a little shake from time to time. Strain contents through a fine sieve and return to the bottle. I like to keep this in the freezer. The fir or spruce flavor is somewhat perishable. It benefits from being kept cold.

Douglas Fir GimletThis is my absolute favorite. It gets a double dose of fir from these ingredients:

Chill a small cocktail glass. Fill cocktail shaker with cubed ice. Let this sit for a minute. Pour in all ingredients. Shake vigorously for as long as you can stand. Remove glass from the freezer and rub a cut lime around the rim. Strain into the chilled glass.

Fill chill glass with ice. Rub lime section around the glass rim. Add the first two ingredients and pour club soda over the top. You can toss the lime you squeezed in too. Stir gently.

Douglas Fir Lime CollinsMake the same drink as above but add a heaping teaspoon of the Douglas fir syrup to this before you stir. You can make this a little more traditional by using lemon in place of the lime.

Rich, elegant, and intense, our native American black walnuts and the magnificent tree they rain down from – embodies so many of the qualities that we admire and take pride in. Just a taste of the rich depth of their flavor makes me feel more grownup and worldly. If the English walnuts are Hugh Grant then black walnuts are Sean Connery ( What American actor fits? Gregory Peck? Robert Mitchum? ). Sadly, most Americans have never tasted black walnuts. The simpler English walnut is all they know.

The black walnut is a tough nut to crack, but it’s well worth it.

Black walnuts’ oily richness is magnificent in pastries and is famously great in or on ice cream. As far as I’m concerned, black walnuts are by far richest flavored of all nutmeats. I venture to say that anything with walnuts will taste superior made with wild black walnuts. Whether it is a simple cookie or a complex cake, black walnuts add remarkable complexity to the flavors.

The recipe for Bourbon Black Walnut Sundae in The Wild Table usually has stains all over the pages of every ones’ copy of the book. Black walnuts and bourbon really like one another.

From something simple like black walnut ice cream, to the fabulous pasta I had last week made with gorgonzola cream sauce and toasted black walnuts – you can’t go wrong. . I’m very partial to a pile of black walnuts on every cheese plate nestled near the blue cheese. I TRY to have a little pile of them on a nice cheese plate sitting next to the blue cheese, but I always nibble away the pile first.

Black walnuts are notoriously difficult to crack. Because of the iron tough shells and the brittle labyrinth of the nut’s interior, they can come out only in pieces. If they weren’t such a colossal horror to shell, the food world would have wild black walnuts starring in dishes and desserts from stem to stern. But they ARE extremely difficult to shell and this fact has relegated them to obscurity in current times. Many of our more patient Grandparents however, revere them for the extraordinary culinary treasures they are.

If you’re drying your hulled walnuts outside, be prepared for some company.

Instructions

You’ll need good gloves, a hammer, ratty clothes, and a hard surface that you don’t care about getting stained. There are three basic steps: 1- Removing the hull from the nut; 2- drying the walnuts; and 3- shelling out the nutmeat.

Hulling is a ridiculous dance. The hull of a ripe black walnut will have a green-gold color and have a little “give”. You have to remove the hull which seamlessly covers the nut. Wearing strong old boots, step on the nut & roll it around forcefully until the hull starts to come off. With gloves on, peel off any remaining hull. Drying the nuts is a cakewalk. Put them in trays or boxes about three to four nuts deep. You could hang them in a strong mesh bag also. Hide them somewhere protected from squirrels and moisture. After about three or four weeks, a nut meat should snap.

Shelling

Many people toss the nuts on their driveway and drive over them repeatedly. Be careful, they can become projectiles. Yes, they are that tough. My father’s method is slower but is still my favorite. Either find a board with a knot hole and knock out the knot to made a hole, or drill a nut sized hole in a ¾-1 inch thick board. Put the nut in the hole, club it with a heavy hammer, lift the board leaving the broken nut behind and repeat this process. The hole keeps the nut stationary. This is mighty important if you value your eyes, or any object you don’t want damaged by a walnut projectile.You’ll end up with a nice heap of broken black walnuts to pick through. The balance of the work you can do in front of a good TV show. Take great care to sort out any shell pieces.

These immature “green” Black Walnuts are suitable for making nocino or pickling.

Either freeze or refrigerate your black walnuts. The rich oils can turn rancid in warm weather. After you worked hard for your pile of shelled black walnuts you certainly want to preserve them and the stability of their trademark oils. Use within the year. Trust me, this will be easy to do.

Heat oven to 350. Sprinkle all the black walnuts and bake for 8-10 minutes. Set a timer!!! Remove from oven and cool. After they’ve cooled, put nuts into a food processor and pulse until they’re a fine meal/powder. Remove from processor.
Cake Pan- Use a 9” round pan, line with parchment and butter the paper lightly.

In the food processor ( you don’t need to wash it ), beat the remaining room temperature butter until quite fluffy. Beat the eggs in one at a time. After all eggs are in, beat in the flour. After this is blended, add the ground nuts and the booze. Bourbon, rum, brandy or a nice liquor of your choice are all OK.

Put the batter in the parchment lined pan and bake for one half hour. Test with a toothpick to make sure it’s not gooey inside. Cool, remove from the pan.

After gently removing the parchment paper, sprinkle with powdered sugar shaken through a fine sieve